Gulliver's Travels eBook

Nothing but an extreme love of truth could have hindered
me from concealing this part of my story. It
was in vain to discover my resentments, which were
always turned into ridicule; and I was forced to rest
with patience, while my noble and beloved country was
so injuriously treated. I am as heartily sorry
as any of my readers can possibly be, that such an
occasion was given: but this prince happened
to be so curious and inquisitive upon every particular,
that it could not consist either with gratitude or
good manners, to refuse giving him what satisfaction
I was able. Yet this much I may be allowed to
say, in my own vindication, that I artfully eluded
many of his questions, and gave to every point a more
favorable turn, by many degrees, than the strictness
of truth would allow. For I have always borne
that laudable partiality to my own country, which
Dionysius Halicarnassensis[79] with so much justice,
recommends to an historian: I would hide the frailties
and deformities of my political mother, and place her
virtues and beauties in the most advantageous light.
This was my sincere endeavor, in those many discourses
I had with that monarch, although it unfortunately
failed of success.

But great allowances should be given to a king who
lives wholly secluded from the rest of the world,
and must therefore be altogether unacquainted with
the manners and customs that most prevail in other
nations: the want of which knowledge will ever
produce many prejudices, and a certain narrowness
of thinking, from which we and the politer countries
of Europe are wholly exempted. And it would be
hard indeed, if so remote a prince’s notions
of virtue and vice were to be offered as a standard
for all mankind.

To confirm what I have now said, and farther to show
the miserable effects of a confined education, I shall
here insert a passage which will hardly obtain belief.
In hopes to ingratiate myself farther into his majesty’s
favor, I told him of an invention discovered between
three and four hundred years ago, to make a certain
powder into a heap, on which the smallest spark of
fire falling would kindle the whole in a moment, although
it were as big as a mountain, and make it all fly up
in the air together with a noise and agitation greater
than thunder. That a proper quantity of this
powder rammed into a hollow tube of brass or iron,
according to its bigness, would drive a ball of iron
or lead with such violence and speed as nothing was
able to sustain its force. That the largest balls
thus discharged would not only destroy whole ranks
of an army at once, but batter the strongest walls
to the ground, sink down ships with a thousand men
in each to the bottom of the sea; and, when linked
together by a chain, would cut through masts and rigging,
divide hundreds of bodies in the middle, and lay all
waste before them. That we often put this powder
into large hollow balls of iron, and discharged them
by an engine into some city we were besieging, which